CRM migrations, read off the vendors’ own limits
What actually moves when you change CRM
The CRM you haveThe CRM you wantHeld on the sidingSwitchyard reads the import and export documentation that CRM vendors publish and writes down what it says: how many rows fit through each door, which parts of your history have a route and which do not, and what you are charged before a single record moves.
The three ceilings nobody reads first
HubSpot, on a paid plan
1,048,576
rows in one import file
Attio
100,000
rows in one import file
Pipedrive
50,000
rows in one import file
monday CRM
8,000
rows in one import file
Read from each vendor’s own import documentation on 24 September 2026. A CRM that publishes no ceiling is not promising you an unlimited one.
Switch notes
All of them →Attio vs Pipedrive: a blank data model or a ready-made pipeline
Attio lets you design the objects; Pipedrive hands you a sales pipeline on day one. What each costs, and what a move carries.
Switch note →11Oct 26, 2026Zoho CRM vs Salesforce: the five-seat bill, the admin question and the move between them
Zoho costs a fraction per seat and ships a Salesforce migration wizard. What a team gives up going one way, and gains going the other.
Switch note →10Sep 24, 2026ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot: when the bill stops counting seats
Moving from a per-seat CRM to a per-contact platform changes what your database costs to keep. Why importing your whole archive is a decision with a monthly price.
Switch note →09Sep 24, 2026Attio vs folk: two new CRMs, one published ceiling
Both sell themselves as the modern alternative to the old CRMs. Only one of them tells you how much data it will take. The prices, the model difference, and the gap.
Switch note →08Sep 24, 2026HubSpot vs Marketo: one of them will not tell you the price
This page contains no Marketo figures, because Adobe's pricing page did not respond. What that means for a comparison — and what HubSpot's published numbers actually say.
Switch note →07Sep 24, 2026HubSpot vs Salesforce: the move, not the feature list
Both are places people leave. One lets you export on any afternoon; the other gives you one attempt a week and 48 hours to collect it. What that difference does to a switching plan.
Switch note →Why a whole site about the move
Because the move is the part nobody prices, and it is the part that goes wrong. A CRM comparison will tell you which one has better forecasting. It will not tell you that the importer at the other end takes fewer than 8,000 rows in a file, or that your call history leaves by a different door from your contacts, or that the plan you were quoted carries a required one-off fee of $1,500 before anything is loaded.
Every one of those is published. None of them is on the page you were sent to.
What this site does and does not do
Switchyard reads vendor documentation. It does not run the software, it has not migrated anyone's database, and there are no test results here, because there were no tests. Where a page says a CRM does something, the sentence names the article it was read from and the date it was read.
That cuts both ways. Where a vendor's own pages refuse to load — Salesforce's help centre will not serve this machine — Switchyard prints no figure at all rather than borrowing one from a directory that may be quoting last year.
The four questions
Every page here asks the same four questions of one move, in the same order, so that two pages can be compared without re-reading both.
- What rides. Records and their fields, in every case. This is the part vendors show you.
- What rides with a catch. The links between records, your activity history, your attachments, your tags — each of these has a condition attached, and the condition is usually in a different article from the one about importing.
- What stays behind. Workflows, automations, reports, dashboards. Not one of the four import articles this site is built on describes moving any of them.
- What it costs before a record moves. Onboarding fees, seat minimums and the difference between the price on the tile and the price on the contract.
Two roads out of the yard
Most people arrive here from one of two places. If you are on HubSpot and the bill has started to climb, start with the HubSpot alternatives, sorted by what the move carries. If you are on Salesforce and the renewal is coming, start with the Salesforce alternatives, which is also the page that explains why getting your data out of Salesforce is on a clock.
If you are not sure you should move at all, that is a legitimate answer and this site says so on both pages. Sometimes the honest recommendation is the free tier you already have, and Switchyard earns nothing when you take it.